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Experts to gather for Global Food Safety Conference

If you’re looking for insights from experts on the retail end of food safety, February’s Global Food Safety Conference might be a good place to start.

The Feb. 26-28 event in Anaheim, Calif., features more than 50 speakers, including food safety and quality managers from Kroger, Royal Ahold, Target, Wal-Mart and Wegmans as well as the Australian retailer Coles. The program also includes regulatory experts from CDC and USDA and academic institutions.

Roughly 1,000 food safety professionals from more than 60 countries are expected to attend. Eighty percent of people who attended last year’s event in Barcelona said they would attend this year’s event in Anaheim, according to a press release. The 2012 conference in Orlando was the largest event to date with nearly 1,000 attendees.

“Our last Global Food Safety Conferences have been highly successful,” Frank Yiannas, Wal-Mart Stores vice president for food safety and the conference’s program chairman, said in the news release. “I sincerely and humbly believe that the 2014 program could be our best one yet. I can tell you with certainty that the program committee has been working very hard. They have put a lot of thought and planning into the 2014 event, and we plan to deliver a world-class program that is going to add a lot of value to our delegates.”

In addition to the conference, a GFSI stakeholder meeting is scheduled for 9 a.m. on Feb. 26 before the conference gets underway. The three-hour session will review GFSI’s achievements during the past year.